In Watermelon Sugar: in ‘watermelon sugar’

this is such a strange.. book.

in a post-apocalyptic world, the sun shines a different colour everyday. in a mysterious, isolated, pastoral community called iDEATH, everything is calm and idyllic, but the calm acceptance of everything without even a knee-jerk reaction, such as of death itself, throws me off balance, and the whole illusory world becomes disconcerting. watermelon sugar is the material used to make everyday objects — lamp oils, window glass, ink used to fabricate this narrative.

the narrator (+ also the nameless protagonist) writes the book. everything is delivered in a logically detached way, as if the narrator has no vulnerabilities, and no cares to give, only subscribing to an unattached mentality. the prose is short, clean, simple, lyrical. but somehow, he finds little amusing moments in the dark landscape of things — having no collective memory as a town, having seen his parents getting eaten by tigers right at the start of the book and not even shedding a tear.

this book walks a very fine line between satire and sincerity. one can read it as Brautigan celebrating an idealistic, apolitical, insular counterculture life with no drama, and minimalist reactions — or he could be carefully criticizing a surreal, detached worldview. the nameless protagonist somehow cleanly shuts out feelings, even in response to death.

(!!!)

i do like this paragraph; some moments brought me into a meditative trance, thinking about a shared forgottenness, a blankness that somehow exists:

I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer. That is my name. Perhaps it was raining very hard. That is my name. Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong — “Sorry for the mistake,” — and you had to do something else. That is my name. Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window. That is my name. Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around. That is my name. Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.

p.s. this book has nothing to do with the harry styles song.

i know he said that it did inspire it. but this is not a sensual ode to the summer.

apparently his ex camille rowe’s fav book, and she got him into reading.

p.p.s. this book also inspired this song called The Tigers by the band Goodbye Kumiko. what is the vibe?

the joyous predictability or calmness after death???

p.p.p.s. richard brautigan sadly died from a self-inflicted gunshot in 1984.